Important Changes Ahead

Two of Si2’s important industry standards efforts will be featured later this month at DesignCon, a popular Silicon Valley event that is now in its 20th year.

In the panel entitled, “System-Level Power Modeling—What’s the Big Deal?”, leading industry experts from AMD, Avago Technologies, Cadence, Docea Power, Qualcomm, and Si2 will focus on the growing need to take a higher level and more flexible approach in modeling and simulating power concerns in design. The panelists will explore some of the most critical questions facing designers today, including best practices, current limitations, and future trends in system level power modeling. This panel is sponsored by Si2’s Low Power Coalition (LPC). Click here for details.

Next, in the panel session entitled, “Moving Towards the Light, a Photonic Extensions API for OpenAccess”, attendees will be introduced to designing with light instead of electrons, and how the design methodologies differ from traditional design. The panelists will then introduce a new set of photonic API extensions that have been developed on top of the industry-standard OpenAccess database, and how designers and tool developers may take advantage of these extensions for their design work. The panelists from Luceda and Si2 have been heavily involved in the architecture, definition, and creation of these OpenAccess extensions over the last several years through Si2’s Silicon Photonics TAB. Click here for details.

System-level power modeling is a very active topic around the industry. Last June, the LPC released a new Multi-Level Power Model standard supporting Transaction-Level Modeling (TLM) semantics, and last month the LPC released v2.1 of the Common Power Format (CPF) standard. Si2 and LPC members are also leading a new IEEE working group (P2416). (More details here.)

The promise of silicon photonics (SP) — including 1,000X data bandwidth, lower power consumption, and improved noise immunity — is getting closer to broad commercialization, and the new OpenAccess SP extensions are expected to play a significant role. The SP TAB is also addressing standardization requirements for photonics-aware PDKs. More at (http://si2.org/sptab_index.php).

DesignCon 2015 will be held Jan. 27-30 in the Santa Clara Convention Center. Register here.